I would love to. I appreciate your looking at the website and asking the difficult questions.
The way we organize entrepreneurship in Canada, broadly, is around corporations and shareholder value. We encourage, through a variety of means, very rapid growth and an extractive approach to building companies. This has resulted in large amounts of financialization and foreign ownership, and a lot of difficulties for smaller communities and more local capital formation.
At Cosmos, we focus more on co-operative approaches to building companies. Informal Systems is structured as a worker co-operative; it's a one person, one vote system. After you've been an employee for nine months—because nine months is the gestation period of a human being—you get one share in the company. That entitles you to one vote. We believe pushing those kinds of ownership models forward—which are more democratic and equitable in governance—can go a long way to improving the structures of the Internet and the ownership models.
Currently, on all the major social media sites and many other Internet platforms, the business model is purely extractive. The contributors of all the value are the users, who don't get compensated at all, because they have no ownership stake. Unless they buy shares on the public markets, they're not otherwise compensated for the incredible amount of value they contribute. It's all just extracted away from them. We're particularly interested in ownership models and corporate models that restore that kind of value to the stakeholders who actually make the contributions.